Little something about logic first:According to Cora Diamond, In the Tractatus, one kind of clarification of meaning works by putting a tautology in conjunction with the unclear proposition, and thereby revealing its inferential connections to other propositions, and therefore its use, function, i.e. meaning (see her ‘Saying and Showing: an example from Anscombe’). That's logical clarification, and I take it that this is meant to be part of a larger account of the place in the Tractatus for what Diamond elsewhere calls “apparatus propositions,” which include tautologies, contradictions, equations, and scientific laws. Different kinds of such apparatus propositions are discussed in the Tractatus in the 6's. These are not all meant to work in exactly the same way. But they do all have a role in clarification—in different kinds of clarification. And they clarify only in conjunction with other sentences: the unclear sentences.What about clarification in ethics? What about the 6.4s? In discussing the Tractarian conception of ethics, Ann-Marrie Christensen suggests that in ethics “whole sentences can be used as a kind of tautologies by showing necessary ethical connections, as for example the sentences ‘You ought to the right thing’, ‘Humans should be respected’ and even a sentence like ‘Murder is wrong’.” (“Wittgenstein and Ethical Norms,” 125). I want to take the idea here that a sentence can function like a tautology in a moral context. The sentences Christensen mentions are not tautologies, although they do sound truistic. But I’m not sure that this is what is essential here. It is, however, an important idea that such sentences can function in clarification of moral meaning—moral significance. That’s what I want to develop. I’m not sure what Christensen means by “showing necessary ethical connections.” Perhaps the suggestion is that we apply the point about logic to ethics, and say that clarification in ethics is similar to clarification in logic in this way: Putting a moral truism in conjunction with a proposition may clarify, or bring out, its moral significance. An example for a morally unclear sentence, perhaps, would be: “Ruth is a human being.” It would, on this suggestion, clarify its moral significance (to the extent that it is not clear) if we say in conjunction “Humans should be respected.” If this suggestion is to be really useful, however, we would in addition require a better notion of what exactly we achieve by such clarification. We need a better notion of moral clarity and unclarity. We need a better notion of what is it to be clear and unclear about the moral significance of a proposition, in relation to being logically clear. In logic, unclarity means not seeing a sentence’s inferential connections to other sentences. In this sense, clarifying the meaning of a sentence is clarifying, bringing out, its inferential, necessary connections to other sentences. But what is the parallel to that in ethics? What does “showing necessary ethical connections” amount to? Does it just mean, again (as in logic) showing inferential connections? – This to me seems to take the parallel with logic too far. And one general worry I keep having in these discussions that emphasize the parallels in the Tractatus between ethics and logic is that the parallels might be taken too far. Namely, that not enough room is left for a distinction between logic and ethics. – We need a better notion of ‘moral clarity,’ as opposed to logical clarity. Perhaps, then, and with a mind to distinguishing between moral and logical clarity, it would help to take another example. A morally unclear sentence: “Ruth is our office manager.” Clarifying sentence: “Ruth is a human being.” Imagine these two sentences uttered in a real conversation. Imagine someone saying: “Don’t worry about the spilled coffee. Leave it to Ruth. She’s our office manager.” And imagine another replying. “She’s our office manager alright, but she is still a human being.” The point of uttering the second sentence can very well be moral clarification: retrieving something moral that was, in a way, lost or forgotten (perhaps in some platonic sense of forgotten). (Rai Gaita has a relevant discussion somewhere about the moral significance of remembering the fact that prison-inmates have mothers.) Comment: notice that what was an unclear sentence in one example ("Ruth is a human being") is a clarifying sentence in another example. And I take it that there is no a priori limit on what can be (function as) moral clarification. Perhaps this indicates that the parallel of ethics with logic has its limits. But still, there is a parallel at least to this extent: by putting a sentence in conjunction with another, we can bring out the significance of the first sentence. Where does the parallel end? My suggestion is that in ethics, as opposed to logic, clarification comes to something that is akin to a disclosure of an aspect. This seems to me a good first stab at a description of what is happening in the example above. Both ethics and logic, then, study modes of meaning, patters of interest, ways in which we own the world in thought and language. That's the parallel. We acquire moral sensitivities by acquiring language. Ethics and logic, however, correspond to two different ways in which meaning is clarified: To logically clarify a proposition or a thought means to bring out its functionality. To clarify a proposition or a thought ethically is to clarify its face.

There is a notion regarding interpretation in philosophy that evidence can be found in a philosopher’s writing to support a certain reading. (In the case of Wittgenstein, I have in mind interpreters like Hacker and Klagge, but I’m sure things like that happen with the interpreters of other philosophers.) The notion I have in mind involves a refusal of philosophy. And to see this, ask: how can one be sure that they have the right understanding of the “evidence” they find in a philosopher’s writing? – It is as if we could be sure that the interpretation of some parts of the philosopher’s writing was unproblematic—was obvious--and could therefore be used as evidence for the interpretation of other unclear parts. And the deep problem with this is that it involves a reluctance to learn from the philosopher: it involves confining the philosopher, and deciding in advance what the philosopher has to say, rather than letting the philosopher teach not only the answers, but also (and more crucially) the questions, the method, the problems. Those who practice this notion of philosophical interpretation typically think of themselves as scientists. But the notion of evidence in this style of interpretation is actually taken from the detective novel. The idea of evidence in science—evidence that would support one theory and undermine another—is different from the notion of evidence in the detective novel, for it is more typical in the former that there should be serious questions about the interpretation of the data collected. Not that the notion of evidence in philosophical interpretation is useless. But there is a question what this notion is; we cannot just assume that we can import a notion from elsewhere. A notion of evidence in philosophical interpretation that seems to me useful would be different both from the scientific and from the detective novel notions, and would involve bringing oneself into the interpretation: it would involve testing the evidence against oneself, rather than against the philosopher’s writings. That is, it would involve submitting oneself to the texts, and seeing whether what is said in the philosopher’s writing allows itself to be thought—or at least allows for an illusion of thought. The refusal to bring oneself into the interpretation of a text in this way—e.g. when it is supported by the assumption that we already know, or even have a good enough notion of, what the philosopher’s intentions must be—is a refusal of philosophy.

Nonsense: “The visual filed has a determinate shape, only we cannot say what it is exactly.” We are saying something, however, if we say: “The visual field looks oval-ish.” Yet, such talk of the shape of the visual field is secondary.

Wittgenstein writes in the notebooks on October 12, 1916: “A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone or from my body is neither good nor bad.” (p. 84). One way to interpret this is as a result of this line of thought: “We cannot will anything into happening, because the will is not causally connected to the world. It is a mere matter of luck, for instance, whether I kill someone if I shoot at them, not only because I may miss, but also because I cannot will the gun into actually going off when I pull the trigger. My will is not connected to the gun directly. But, come to think of it, I cannot even will my finger into contracting on the trigger; for with all my willing, something might still prevent that from happening. I may become paralyzed. My will is not directly connected to my finger either. And similarly, I cannot will the neurons in my arm into functioning properly; my will is not directly connected to those either. And so on. In general, then, I cannot will ANY event: in my brain, or anywhere else. My will is not connected to the world.” – This is how Lars Hertzberg seems to understand the quotation above from the notebooks.

The will is thus pushed out of the causal connection of things, and impressed by this line of thought, we may want to join what Wittgenstein writes in the notebooks.

Note, however, that in this line of thought the idea remains of the will as event—albeit an unconnected one. The problem now seems to be to explain how it nevertheless connects. For there is a certainty here: it is connected. We have this strong sense that one part of the world—typically one connected to our body—is closer to us than others. There are things in the world that we can just will into happening, and things that we can’t. It just now seems like a complete mystery—even the possibility of a connection between the will and the world is enigmatic. The line of thought described above has robbed us of our intuition.

The real problem for this view, however, is more radical. For it is not really clear what we can possibly mean by saying of willing that it is an unconnected event. If it is not in the causal nexus of things, then it is arguably not an event at all; since that’s part of the logic, the grammar, of being an event. It is, we can say, a grammatical condition on something being an event that it is causally connected to other events.

Rather than accepting the line of thought above, then, it is better to take it as a kind of reductio. It is better to use this line of thought, that is, to raise a more radical consideration: If the will is thus pushed out of the causal nexus of events, perhaps that’s because we cannot really think of it as an event in the first place. And if this feels like a loss, then perhaps this feeling is unfounded. Perhaps we don’t really need to think of it as an event. Perhaps it all means that wiling doesn’t have the logic we think we need it to have, and that it is not an event at all. Perhaps, that is, we need to discard of the picture of willing as an event.

What else could willing be? –

There is good reason to think that Wittgenstein in the notebooks did not think of willing as a kind of event. He writes about three weeks later, on November 4, 1914, (p. 87): “The act of the will is not the cause of the action but is the action itself.” There is therefore good reason to think that Wittgenstein understood that the problem is not that of connecting the will to the world by finding it a place in the causal nexus of things.

Wittgenstein seems here rather to be endorsing an Aristotelian view of willing: willing as the possible form of actions. “The fact that I will an action consists in my performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action” (Ibid). Willing is not an event that is separate from the willed action. Accordingly, actions can be willful (or intentional) or not. Saying that an action was willful is not saying that there occurred an event just before the action. It is rather a way of describing the action-event itself—the significance that it has. This, in the same way that saying of certain connected pieces of wood that they are a chair is not saying something about something that is separate from the pieces of wood, but about their significance. Forms, as Aristotle says are not separable “except in statement”—i.e. in thought and talk (Physics II, 1, 193b, 4).

Endorsing this, we can now get our intuition back--the one the line of thought above has robbed us of: Some events in the world are indeed closer to us than others, not because there was a willing event which was somehow intimately connected to us that caused those events (e.g. movements of our body). Some events are closer to us in the sense that they are our actions. They have the form of being ours. When I say: “I did it because I wanted to.” I am not saying something about an event that happened before my action. Rather, I am describing the action in a particular way, placing it in a certain nexus of reasoning: it is one over which I’m taking responsibility, for instance.

Alternative reading of Wittgenstein’s saying that all events stand on the same level

A question remains about Wittgenstein: If Wittgenstein endorsed the Aristotelian view of willing, why did he say in the first quotation above that all events stand on the same level? Should he not have recognized that despite the fact that all events are events, they may still have different forms--some willful and some not?

One way to answer this is to say that in those three weeks between the first and the second quotations above Wittgenstein changed his mind. This is possible, but I believe something important will be lost if we interpret Wittgenstein in this way. Instead, and this is what I suggest, when Wittgenstein writes that all events stand on the same level he is not doing philosophy of action in the first place. That is, he is taking himself to be onto something that has to do with ethics, but not with the philosophy of action in general. Accordingly, in that first quotation, Wittgenstein is not concerned with the grammar of "willing" in general. It is rather ethical willing--only ethical wiling--that he is interested in. This is my suggestion.

It is quite obvious in the quotation under discussion that Wittgenstein takes what he says there to have a moral point. In general, in support of my suggestion, when Wittgenstein in the notebooks talks of the will as external to events and actions--as he does in that first quotation--he does that as part of a discussion about ethics, God, the meaning of life, and so on. It is in this context, rather than in a context of a discussion about the theory of action, or the grammar thereof, that he says such things. So, according to my suggestion, Wittgenstein had a point about ethical willing, which is not at the same time a point about willing in general. And to see what this point is, I propose we ask the following question: Suppose we take that picture of the will as event--the picture I said we need to discard of. Can we do something with this picture? The reason I am recalling that picture--the one I labored against--is because I do not believe that the argument I gave above against that picture can show that it is completely useless. Perhaps this argument can have such total effect insofar as philosophy of action is concerned; perhaps. I used it above for such a purpose. But even so, this doesn't mean it should have such effect in ethics. Showing that the picture is useless in one place is not showing that it is everywhere useless.To explain, we need to separate the needs we have in the philosophy of action from the needs we have in ethics. For Wittgenstein, at least, ethics is not a subsection of the philosophy of action. And like Kant, Wittgenstein does not have a unified account of practical rationality. We have a certain need in the philosophy of action: to explain the occurrence of certain events and actions. We call upon the misleading picture for help. But it misleads us. It gives us the wrong idea regarding what 'explanation of action' amounts to. It treats actions as mere events. It doesn't satisfy our real needs. But--and this is the point now--the needs this picture doesn't satisfy are in the philosophy of action. And we have other needs, different kind of needs, in ethics. And so my question is: what ethical needs might this picture be able to help us with? My answer is this: The picture has a possible use in a kind of moral training. It can help us with an ethical need. In particular, one thing this picture can do is to help us feel dependent. Construing everything that happens as separate from us--including our own actions, which are what is most intimately connected to us--is a way of giving our life the character of dependence. The picture can thus make humility and gratitude a natural necessity. It can help us endorse dependence as certainty, as a basic mode of living. It can help to give our life the aspect of not being in our control, perhaps as controlled from the outside, from above. - The picture colors things in a particular way.

“A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level. That is why what happens, whether it comes from a stone or from my body is neither good nor bad.” – Saying this as part of such moral training is making a grammatically different use of a picture.